Content marketing is an indispensable arrow in the digital marketing quiver these days. Nonetheless, it could prove to be a heavy-hitter for your business only if it’s done in the right way. So, instead of blindly investing your time and effort into the most popular content marketing strategies, figure out what’s best fit for your business and then pump in the required resources and money into it.

GoodFirms’ research team carried out a survey of 50+ digital marketers and entrepreneurs to find the biggest challenges faced by their content marketing team, and also the tips and tricks executed by different businesses to fight these challenges.

Nearly 98% of the respondents found content marketing to be an effective tool to accelerate search engine rankings, lead generations, not to mention boosting of web traffic.

Businesses were earmarking almost 25% of the budget toward content production and distribution.

Some of the biggest challenges faced in content marketing include creation of engaging content and also tracking and measuring content marketing campaign ROI.

Almost 98% of the respondents found content marketing to be an effective tool to accelerate search engine rankings, lead generations, and to boost web traffic.

Budget spent on Content Marketing as per GoodFirms Survey

Seasoned digital marketers know how crucial content marketing is to their digital marketing strategy. The right content strategy used on the right platforms help brands reach the right audience, and, in turn, attracting leads and conversions.

Without content marketing, online brands would almost get buried under the heap of tens of thousands of sites being launched every single day. To position your brand as a leading service/product provider and to have an edge over your competitors, there’s no alternative but to spend some significant amount in quality content initiatives.

Now, the question is: how much to earmark for your content marketing initiatives? Of the 50+ experts, we connected with, hailing from different sectors respectively, we found out that on an average, businesses allocate 25% of the marketing budget to content production and marketing.

Here’s a detailed analysis of 50+ experts on how they allocate their marketing budget to their content marketing initiatives.

Content Marketing Challenges – Good vs Great Content

Creating good content is not that hard. Creating great content is. For one, most of the content these days hinge around business perspective and not from the customer perspective. Another point being, digital marketers are not really happy pumping money into content marketing activities. All these aspects make it difficult for businesses to publish brilliant content.

The pie chart given below displays the five major challenges faced by content marketers.

It’s pretty much evident from the above chart that the top 3 challenges faced by marketers include generating engaging content, developing a productive content strategy and systematic measurement of content marketing ROI at various levels.

GoodFirms’ in-house research spoke to a couple of top content marketing specialists to shed light on the top challenges their facing with regard to their content marketing efforts:

According to Pierre de Braux, the Content Strategist at Spiralytics Inc, the biggest challenge the company is facing in terms of content marketing is framing an effective content strategy. Loads of content is being produced these days. So it’s really important these days to figure out what to produce and how to distribute it.

According to Tom James of Digital Fox, measuring ROI of your content campaigns has gotten all the harder with “fake” social shares on the rise. Even tracking of Influencer content campaigns is not that easy if you are not using tracking tools.

According to John Huntinghouse, Director of Digital Marketing at Epic Marketing, in an attempt to attract RV dealers, executed an inbound content marketing strategy that revolved around extensively written white papers. The white papers, with a special focus on keywords and pain points, became so popular that even after 2 years it’s still attracting leads for their content strategy.

For Stephanie Fehrmann Co-founder and Head of Content of Redefine Marketing Group, quizzes have been doing the trick for her. Once she worked out a quiz to serve dual purposes for her clients. One, it increases the social share count. Two, to decrease the bounce rate. The format of the quiz was such that quiz questions actually started on page two. So, no matter what, the users went through page one, which automatically brought down the bounce rates, drastically.

Even roping in the micro-influencers to share quizzes paid off. Even pinning and repinning of quizzes on Pinterest accounts helped.

According to Ulysis Cababan, Content Strategist at RapidVisa Philippines, Facebook Live has been their go-to content marketing strategy for some time now as it is helping them boost brand awareness and engagement and also shed light on things that need enlightenment.

Wrapping Up

There is no one size fits all content strategy for businesses. Businesses need to A/B test different strategies to figure out what works best for them. Taking expert opinion also helps as they’ll help you nail down some out-of-the-box approaches to advertise your product or service. Irrespective of the strategies you adopt, always remember there’s no shortcut to content marketing. It shows returns only in the long run. If you can, consult some top content marketing companies to chart out an in-depth editorial content for you to kick-start the year in an affirmative note.